MARK TWAIN AND HUNTER THOMPSON: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN AMERICAN "OUTLAW JOURNALISM"

Its other claims notwithstanding, this essay is not about to argue that Mark Twain was our first Gonzo Journalist, nor particularly to maintain that he practiced a kind of ur-Gonzo upon a naive and unsuspecting public more than a one hundred years before Hunter Thompson minted the term and established its notoriety. It does, however, seek to compare what Thompson is up to, insofar as it can be described and abstracted, with Mark Twain’s efforts, particularly in Roughing It, at creating and maintaining a journalistic mode that is innovative, flexible, caustic, and richly fictive. The similarities I intend to observe here are not essentially stylistic. They derive rather from the ways in which the two writers conceive of their roles as reporters, of their distance from the material they treat, of their own idiosyncratic talents, and of the strictures they associate with traditional (or Eastern, or "straight" journalism. I mean to assert a kinship between Mark Twain and Hunter Thompson that has fundamentally to do with their mutual impatience with these strictures and with their ingenuity in exceeding them. The operating principles of Gonzo Journalism, moreover, provide new benchmarks against which to measure Mark Twain’s accomplishment as a reporter, just as the similarities between the two writers offer a backdrop against which to contrast their strikingly dissimilar views of the world.

Gonzo Journalism, which reached its apotheosis with the publication of Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), carries the tenets of New Journalism to—and then beyond—their logical limits. It is aggressively subjective, intensely imaginative, determinedly iconoclastic, and almost unremittingly "literary" (picaresque, for the most part, in that it typically pursues a comic central character, ostensibly the author, through a series of episodic adventures). Among its major premises is the conviction that the principle of objectivity upon which traditional journalism depends is rooted in a lie, and a barren lie at that. According to Thompson,

Objective Journalism is a hard thing to come by these days. We all yearn for it, but who can point the way?  . . .The only thing I ever saw that came close to Objective Journalism was a closed-circuit TV setup that watched shop-lifters in the General Store at Woody Creek, Colorado. I always admired that machine, but I noticed that nobody paid much attention to it. . . . With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phase is a pompous contradiction in terms.

In establishing Gonzo’s philosophical underpinnings, Thompson makes a familiar case for serving a truth that transcends the merely factual and documentary. "It is a style of ‘reporting,’ "he says, "based on William Faulkner’s idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism—and the best journalists have always known this." Ultimately, Thompson argues, " . . . both ‘fiction’ and ‘journalism’ are artificial categories; . . . both forms, at their best, are only two different means to the same end."² The Gonzo credo frees the writer from the narrow confines of factitiousness while it obligates him to discover and reveal the seminal truths which facts only imperfectly reflect. This is the charge—no slouch of a charge, as Mark Twain might have observed—that rests at the heart of Thompson’s insistence that the Gonzo reporter’s burden is to cover the story.

In a very real sense the Gonzo Journalist covers the story with layer upon layer of other stories, bits of fiction that may begin in hyperbole, proceed through distortion, and end in flights of fancy, all in service—theoretically, at least—to the truth of whatever experience is being described. Consider this excerpt from what is generally regarded as the first piece of Gonzo Journalism on record, an article by Thompson entitled "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," which appeared in the June, 1970, issue of Scanlan’s Monthly. In the passage, Thompson is trying to prepare his illustrator, Ralph Steadman, for the ordeal of the Derby by giving him a series of verbal snapshots of Derby behavior:

Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier as they lose more and more money. By midafternoon they’ll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomiting on each other between races. The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It’s hard to move around. The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up. (GSH, p. 31)

Responses to such an instance of allegedly journalistic description will surely differ, but for many of us, I suspect, the first, uncritical returns shout, "Yes—that’s it!" We easily and unselfconsciously adjust to the exaggeration, to the fictiveness, in the passage because it is obviously in service to a truth about the Kentucky Derby—it is decadent and depraved—that we are willing to entertain and perhaps to accept.

Other journalists, so-called straight journalists, employ this tactic on occasion, and of course avowed fictionists have been doing it for centuries. Thompson’s enterprise becomes noteworthy—becomes Gonzo, in fact—when he permits his fiction to take on a life of its own

and even, on occasion, to eclipse fact. At the moment of that eclipse the story—the news event—is quite literally covered and the boundaries of straight journalism are trespassed. An instance of such trespass takes place in Thompson’s Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 as Thompson is in the process of describing Maurice Stans’s informing Clark McGregor that the 1972 Nixon campaign budget has "just been boosted to $45 million. . . ."

At that point, McGregor cracked Stans upside the head with a Gideon Bible and called him a "thieving little fart." McGregor then began shoving the rest of us out of the room, but when Stans tried to leave, McGregor grabbed him by the neck and jerked him back inside. Then he slammed the door and threw the bolt. . . .

The narration breaks off here, and then, after a pause, Thompson does a rare thing: He tells us outright that we’re being put on.

Jesus, why do I write things like that? I must be getting sick, or maybe just tried of writing about these greasy Rotarian bastards. (FLCT, p. 349)

A plank in reason has broken—Thompson jumps up and down on such planks all through his account of the 1972 presidential campaign—and we have been pitched into a contiguous fantasy world where political operatives act out their pettiness and their petulance and reveal themselves for the "greasy Rotarian bastards" they are.

Like Gonzo Journalist Thompson, Washoe Journalist Mark Twain is capable of making the straight-faced assertion that he intends to limit himself strictly to the facts in covering a story. "I am not given to exaggeration," he says in Roughing It, "and when I say a thing I mean it."³ His predilection to virtue to the contrary, however, Mark Twain could bring himself to exaggerate, perhaps as many as half a dozen times in a single paragraph, for a reporter’s salary. The modus operandi of the Western journalist, as many critics have observed, not only permitted but in fact encouraged distortion, sensationalism, hoaxing, and an enthusiastic kind of character assassination that occasionally led to duels and sometimes even to shooting.⁴ Mark Twain took advantage of this license in a number of ways during the early stages of his career, perhaps most characteristically in his use of the "stretcher," a construction which begins in homely observation and ends in the hyperbolic terrain somewhere on the outskirts of plausibility. Consider the following account, in Roughing It, of a "Washoe Zephyr," the domestic hurricane of the Nevada Territory:

 . . . the vast dust-cloud was thickly freckled with things strange to the upper air—things living and dead, that flitted hither and thither, going and coming, appearing and disappearing among the rolling billows of dust

—hats, chickens and parasols sailing in the remote heavens; blankets, tin signs, sage-brush and shingles a shade lower; door-mats and buffalo roves still lower; shovels and coal scuttles on the next grade; glass doors, cats and little children on the next; disrupted lumber yards, light buggies, and wheelbarrows on the next; and down only thirty or forty feet above ground was a scurrying storm emigrating roofs and vacant lots. (RI, p. 156)

Although this passage is ostensibly descriptive, it carries an unmistakable and intrinsic signature, the interposition of a personality between subject and audience. While our interest may be drawn and even held by the phenomenon being described, some share of our attention is diverted to the writer. We find ourselves wondering about the imagination behind (not too far behind) this invention, this language. In doing so we join in the violation of the rules which govern the objective journalist, rules which regard the writer as a transparent medium whose purpose is to focus and clarify a picture for an audience, rules which expressly forbid his insinuating himself into that picture. The audience, for its part, is expected to look through this medium, not at it.

Gonzo Journalists and New Journalists take as a first principle the deliberate violation of this prohibition against the writer’s "involvement" in a story; it forms the cutting edge of their attack on what they regard as the fettering conventions of the ancien régime. "The only way to write honestly about the scene," according to Thompson, "is to be part of it" (GSH, p. 393). That the Washoe Journalist anticipated Thompson and others in this violation by about a century is much less a consequence of conviction on his part than of simple expediency in responding to the demands of a rough-and-tumble, adventure-hungry audience.⁵ As a reporter Mark Twain shambled, stumbled and elbowed his way into the field of the action he was "covering" because his otherwise uncritical readers required that something happen to someone. They needed a witness who was simultaneously a kind of palpable direct object, not simply the perpetrator of dispassionate intransitive constructions. Apart from a willingness to satisfy this popular appetite, there was no theory of Western journalism. In its indiscipline, outrageousness, and impatience with conventional restraints, it innocently reflected both the conditions out of which it had been born and the public to whom it was addressed. Its excesses were those of a region, and its tendency to transform reporters into agents, victims, and personalities was the unpremeditated result of the peculiar exigencies within which it operated.

On the other hand, the Gonzo practitioner, while he may often behave much like a Washoe newspaperman, has made participatory journalism not simply a habit, but a credo. He regards his role from a relentlessly modern outlook, one which acknowledges the subjectivity of

any experience and which therefore treats impartial or "objective" reporting as an impossibility. Convinced that all reportage inevitably takes on the coloration of the reporter’s perceptions, the Gonzo writer embraces subjectivity and unapologetically installs himself at the center of his story. From this vantage point—the only honest vantage point, given Gonzo’s theoretical underpinnings—he passes along to his readers a version of reality which claims to be nothing more than that. So massive and ubiquitous does he become, in fact, that at times there is room for little else on his pages. "True Gonzo reporting," says Thompson,

needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist! photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he’s writing it. . . . Probably the closest analogy would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character. (GSH, p. 106)

Here, then, is a second way in which the Gonzo journalist "covers" a story—by taking so vital a part in it that to a considerable extent he becomes the story. As the following episode demonstrates, there comes a time when the Gonzo reporter finds his subject, his revelation, not through a clear lens, but in a mirror. Toward the end of his piece on the Kentucky Derby, Thompson laments not having been able to find "that special kind of face" that betrays and epitomizes Derby decadence.

It was a face I’d seen a thousand times at every Derby I’d ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as a mask of the whiskey gentry—a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture. (GSH, p. 31)

At last, the face appears.

My eyes had finally opened enough for me to focus on the mirror across the room and I was stunned at the shock of recognition. For a confused instant I thought Ralph [Steadman] had brought somebody with him—a model for that one special face we’d been looking for. There he was, by God—a puffy, drink-ravaged, disease-ridden creature . . . like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot in some once-proud mother’s family photo album, It was the face we’d been looking for—and it was, of course, my own. (GSH, p. 37)

When a writer determines to serve "as the protagonist or at least a main character" in his work, much of his energy is taken up in the creation of an appropriate and serviceable persona. Once a persona is fixed in his own mind—and in the imaginations of his readers—a surprisingly large portion of his work is done: He has gone a long way toward establishing the tone, style, stance, and approach of the pieces into which that figure is introduced. It may test his ingenuity to invent

opportunities, adventures, trials and catastrophes into which to interject his persona, but no other imaginative accomplishment will rival the creation of that persona in terms of the consequences it generates. Sam Clemens’s early success (like much of his continuing success) was chiefly due to his construction of "Mark Twain" out of the materials that Western journalism made available to him. It was in order to see what "Mark Twain" would make of Europe and the Holy Land that a California newspaper underwrote his $1250 passage aboard the Quaker City, and it was in order to see what irreverent, outlandish, and otherwise provocative things "Mark Twain" had to say about both East and West that an eager public bought his first two books, The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1871). Although the line separating Sam Clemens from Mark Twain became much more difficult to trace as the years went by, it was initially unmistakable.⁷

If Thompson’s Raoul Duke seems to be a rather transparent creation, especially when compared to Clemens’s perpetration of Mark Twain, it is therefore nothing but a redundancy. Thompson’s real investment is in the creation of "Dr. Hunter S. Thompson," the "Dr." (of Gonzo letters) serving as a nominal wink at the co-conspiratorial reader. There may be "another" Thompson behind this persona, a decent, deliberate fellow who undergoes dental checkups and puts out the cat, but we see nothing of him. In fact, in a number of Gonzo pieces we get what purport to be behind-the-scenes glimpses of the "real" or domestic Thompson—transcriptions of diary-like dictation, communiqués to and from plaintive editors—which indicate that he is every bit as frenetic, desperate, and profane as the "protagonist" we are watching. (An incidental note from Thompson to John Chancellor, for example, begins, "You filthy skunk-sucking bastard!" [FLCT, p. 324]). We get the feeling that Thompson is always "in character," that the dimensions of his life have shrunk to coincide with those of his persona.

Sam Clemens tended to respond in much the same way when he found that people expected him always to be "on" as Mark Twain—by building the elaborate, whimsical Hartford house, by holding droll audiences with reporters, by dressing in white linen suits and sealskin coats—but his sense of the separation between the man and the mask was ultimately more dynamic and complex than Thompson’s appears to be. On the one hand, he perfected "Mark Twain," took him on the lecture circuit, and made not one but several fortunes by doing so. Rendering "Mark Twain" a stage performer was to an extent a process of simplifying his character and playing up to the expectations of an audience. On the other hand, "Mark Twain" grew considerably in the course of Clemens’s life, taking on depth, subtlety and increasing seriousness as the work bearing his name deepened and darkened.

Other similarities and difficulties aside, however, Clemens and Thompson are alike in depending on the reputations they have carefully established for their personae in order to draw and hold readers to their texts. Moreover, these personae share a number of important characteristics: Both are adventurous and vulnerable, receptive to new experience and eager to involve themselves in the worlds to which their assignments take them. Both are outsiders by many ways of reckoning. They are often new to the experience they treat, whether it be a ride in an overland stage or a ride with the Hell’s Angels; they rarely earn the full acceptance of the group they nominally join; they remain almost congenitally beyond the pall of Establishment propriety. Both are entirely capable of being boorish and self-indulgent, but their behavior is so often juxtaposed against the hypocrisy or venality of others that a measure of our sympathy goes out to them. Both are provided with foils (Mark Twain’s Blucher and Ferguson, for example; Thompson’s Square and Bloor) whose limitations place their own capacities in higher relief. Above all, both have an almost sacramental regard for honesty. At first this may seem something of a paradox, given their willingness to stretch the truth in their abundant fictionalizing, but, again, both regard fiction as a means of making the truth more emphatic, not of distorting or misrepresenting it. Behind the facade of exaggeration and outrageousness, Clemens and Thompson mean to approach their audiences with point-blank candor. "This is the way the campaign was for me," Thompson says at the outset of Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 72, "and for the people it wound me up with. . ." (FLCT, jacket copy). Similarly, Mark Twain prefaces The Innocents Abroad with the observation that

notwithstanding it is only a record of a picnic, it has a purpose, which is to suggest to the reader how he would likely see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him.⁸

For both writers immediacy is a concomitant of honesty; the most genuine responses and insights are likely to be those that the reporter records while he is on the spot, in the middle of the action he is covering. Thompson refers to this as writing "from an eye in the eye of the hurricane" and likens the result to "a kind of high-speed cinematic record of what the [event] was like at the time . . . (FLCT, pp.20–21). The travel letter format of much of his early writing offered some similar prerogatives to Mark Twain, who mastered the art of bringing an experience to a reader while it was still "hot" before he turned to reminiscence and reflection to generate the great works of his mid-career. Thompson has remained committed to the principle of immediacy, of getting the story

hot, and regards it as the sine qua non of Gonzo writing. "My idea," he says in recalling his plan for covering the Mint 400 motorcycle race in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,

was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send the notebook for publication—without editing. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera. The writing would be selective & necessarily interpretive—but once the image was written, the words would be final. . . . No alterations in the darkroom, no cutting or cropping, no spotting . . . no editing. (GSH, p. 106)

Only the unvarnished truth will do. The Gonzo reporter contents himself not simply with getting the story hot; he wants it to be—or at least to seem—unprocessed as well. The wetter the ink on the page, the better. In completing the manuscript for Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, Thompson says,

I developed an insoluble Writer’s Block and began dictating big chunks of the book straight into the microphone—pacing around the room at the end of an eighteen-foot cord and saying anything that came into my mind. When we reached the end of a tape the editor would jerk it out of the machine and drop it into a satchel . . . and every twelve hours or so a messenger would stop by to pick up the tape satchel and take it downtown to the office, where unknown persons transcribed it onto manuscript paper and sent it straight to the printer in Reno. (FLCT, p.16)

Against such a backdrop, even Mark Twain’s lifelong impatience with the editorial process pales nearly to insignificance.

Two further points might be made about the helter-skelter immediacy of much Gonzo writing. The first is that, like many instances of Washoe Journalism, it characteristically pursues and episodic line which is occasionally disjunctive and often digressive. The reader runs the gauntlet of experience with the writer, who unhesitatingly sacrifices discipline for the sake of spontaneity and intensity. The Gonzo piece is a frantic chase across anecdotal terrain in pursuit of some evanescent idea or essence—the depravity of the Kentucky Derby, the pointless frenzy of a motorcycle race or a presidential campaign, the bloated ignorance of a law enforcement convention, the hype behind a Super Bowl or an Ali fight. The second point is that the Gonzo reporter’s assault on his subject implicitly reflects his lack of confidence in the continuity or inherent meaningfulness of experience. We live in a chaotic cosmos, his work argues, where truth itself—perhaps reality itself—is fragmentary, elusive and transitory. Journalistic attempts to deal with such a cosmos, whatever else they accomplish by way of conveying some sense of actuality to a reader, must bear witness to that chaos. For Thompson, who likens himself to "a wino turned loose in the tasting room" (FLCT, jacket copy), the sense of chaos is palpable and often overwhelming. At

one point in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, for example, he tries to reconstruct an experience—and a story—from the fragments which float up in its wake:

Saturday night. . . . Memories of this night are extremely hazy. All I have, for guide-pegs, is a pocketful of keno cards and cocktail napkins, all covered with scribbled notes.⁹

Such debris, the tokens one gathers while lurching through the discontinuous episodes of a night or a nightmare, are in Thompson’s view all we have from which to assemble a plausible reality. Our "doomed atavistic culture" (GSH, p. 31), epitomized in Kentucky Derbies, Super Bowls, and the pleasure domes of Las Vegas, fairly reflects the character of the random and arbitrary universe in which it operates. At the Circus-Circus casino, which Thompson describes as being "in the vortex" of the American Dream, he records a tableau vivant that speaks to the modern condition (" . . . right smack above your head is a half-naked fourteen-year-old girl being chased through the air by a snarling wolverine, which is suddenly locked in a death battle with two silver-painted Pollaks who come swinging down from opposite balconies and meet in mid-air on the wolverine’s neck. . . .") only to realize that "nobody seems to notice." His conclusion: " . . . this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted" (FLLV, pp.46–47). Casino habitués may be inured to the craziness that surrounds them, but otherwise their circumstances are little different from our own. Behaving as he believes we all do and must, Thompson ransacks his memory and imagination for frantic glimpses of what he calls "a world that will not stand still long enough for [us] to see it clear as a whole" (GSH, p. 372).¹⁰  The frenzy, disorder and gratuitous violence which pervade the work of an "outlaw journalist" are, from his angle of vision, simply and essentially the facts of life. That we sometimes mask or deny these facts in no way diminishes the Gonzo writer’s prerogative to acknowledge and even to savor them.

Mark Twain may seem to savor a similar view of the world in a book like Roughing It, which abounds in lawlessness, brutality, and a sense of frontier unconstraint.¹¹ But in fact Clemens and Thompson are polar opposites in their responses to the chaos which they find all around them. For all his wonderment at its wildness, Mark Twain ultimately reacts to the West with the instincts of one who has come from "some other world" (RI, p. 75), a settled world whose otherness rests in its not being lawless and unfettered. He is making a foray into unfamiliar territory, as he had in writing from the Sandwich Islands and from the Old World, in order to beguile an audience made up of participants, like him, in a stable Eastern culture. "Even at this day," he says from the distance that ten years and about 2500 miles provide,

"it thrills me through and through to think of the life, the gladness and the wild sense of freedom that used to make the blood dance in my veins on those fine overland mornings!" (RI, p. 66). Later he adds, "It was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society!" (RI, p. 371). His relish for wildness and freedom notwithstanding, however, Mark Twain finally indicts frontier "desperadoism," implicitly acknowledging both the desirability and the inevitability of the triumph of Eastern order over Western chaos. In time his view would change, but early in his career he could take pleasure in the wildness of the West because be regarded it as anomalous and because he believed in the meliorating effect of history.

Thompson, conversely, doubts that chaos can be localized, either temporally or geographically. He does not move from a tame world to a wild one; his world is of a piece, and profoundly unstable. If the settings he chooses are in any way extraordinary, it is in their compression or distillation of universal entropy and dissolution. While much of Mark Twain’s work as a journalist led him to deal with what he regarded as the exotic, Thompson’s pursues what seems to him the quintessential. He is transfixed by the meaninglessness and depravity he finds near at hand because they point to a vaster darkness beyond. Clemens eventually came to a similar conviction, in the last two decades of his life, but his outrage at cosmic indifference (and, no doubt, a residual sense of propriety) prevented him from responding to it as Thompson does—by running with it.

Given Gonzo’s view of the world, Thompson manifests a kind of ironic Emersonianism by seeking to behave in perfect accord with the nature of things. But while Emerson found nature to be harmonious, comprehensible and ultimately unifying, Thompson’s cosmos is random and disintegrative. Like Emerson’s American Scholar, he responds to the world around him by ratifying and intensifying what he finds there, obliterating the distinction between self-reliance and self-indulgence in the process. If ever a man were at one with his times, it is the Gonzo journalist feverishly accommodating himself to modern decadence. Consider Thompson’s readying himself for the escapades that make up Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, for example:

" . . . first we need the car. And after that, the cocaine. And then the tape recorder, for special music, and some Acapulco shirts." The only way to prepare for a trip like this, I felt, was to dress up like human peacocks and get crazy, then screech off across the desert and cover the story. (FLLV, pp. 11–12)

Considerably later, the book having been published, he adds, "I was there, neck deep in the madness . . . and I got so high and wild that I felt like a two-ton Manta Ray jumping all the way across the Bay of Bengal" (GSH, p. 110).

In taking the cosmic tiger by the tail and attempting to meet a heedless, arbitrary universe on its own terms, Thompson in yet another way thrusts himself upon the reader and demands his attention, if not his sympathy. We witness and to a remarkable extent participate in the neck-deep madness—the violence, the mindlessness, the drugs—all the while taking part in a ritual of self-destruction that culminates in what Thompson calls "the dead end loneliness of a man who makes his own rules" (GSH, p. 98). As we make our way into one of his Gonzo pieces we find ourselves asking, "Why would a person act this way?" But as we are carried further we begin to wonder, "If this is the nature of things, why act otherwise?"

Correcting our perception of "the nature of things" is the serious business of Mark Twain and Hunter Thompson alike. In each case this corrective, the process of challenging the assumptions by which we operate, has both a broadly philosophic and a more parochial or national application. Philosophically, Clemens and Thompson want to move us away from prevailing popular conceptions of order, toward outlooks that are more complex and often unsettling. Mark Twain indicts the conventional romantic sensibility that had by the latter half of the nineteenth century degenerated into an uncritical preference for sentiment, decorum, and a panoply of anemic stereotypes which misrepresented experience by reducing and generally Bowdlerizing it. He insists upon looking at the world as it is, and upon making the distinction between the real and the romantic clear to his reader. In Roughing It, for instance, he tells what became of the "dramatically adventurous" prospect of crossing the desert by day:

This enthusiasm, this stern thirst for adventure, wilted under the sultry August sun and did not last above one hour. . . . The poetry was all in the anticipation—there was none in the reality. Imagine a vast, waveless ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes; imagine this solemn waste tufted with ash-dusted sagebushes; imagine the lifeless silence and solitude that belong to such a place; imagine a coach, creeping like a bug through the midst of this shoreless level. . . . (RI, p. 141)

Images continue relentlessly to accumulate, fairly crushing and stifling the reader, until he is forced to a summary judgment:

The alkali dust cut through our lips, it persecuted our eyes, it ate through the delicate membranes and made our noses bleed and kept them bleeding—and truly and seriously the romance all faded far away and disappeared, and left the desert trip nothing but a harsh reality—a thirsty, sweltering, longing, hateful reality! (RI, p. 142)

Romantic preconceptions may seem to be merely pleasant, innocuous oversimplifications when they are in fact the very type of irresponsible sham that Mark Twain held accountable for vast human misery. One is reminded, in this regard, of his charge that the South’s susceptibility to the romantic excesses of Walter Scott was responsible for the Civil War.

As Clemens sought to move his reader from decadent romanticism to realism, Thompson wants to lead his into a kind of hyper reality where exaggeration serves to underscore rather than obscure the terms by which we live. His work is about as far from Scott’s as one might care to go. He seems to be seeking, in his own words, "to erase the narrow confines of most men’s reality" (GSH, p. 406) by treating a "protagonist" who willfully and routinely trespasses those confines in order to discover the true limits of that reality. "I felt like a monster reincarnation of the Horatio Alger myth," he says at the very end of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, " . . . a Man on the Move, just sick enough to be totally confident" (FLL V, p. 204). This sickness, which runs virulent in the Gonzo penchant for larger-than-life excesses and gross indulgence, may not be to everyone’s taste, but Thompson seems convinced that its pathology is the pathology of modern man.

As Thompson’s reference to the Alger myth suggests, both he and Clemens are more narrowly concerned with the specific pathology—and vitality—of America. It is something of an understatement to observe that neither is a conventionally patriotic or jingoistic spokesman; both are candid in their desire to see this country for what it is, warts and all, and both carry on a love-hate relationship with "the people." And yet few of our writers have been so obsessed as these two to examine the American character and the myths which sustain it. At bottom this examination turns on a question which Thompson phrased in a post-Watergate essay in the New York Times on New Year’s Day, 1974: "Is democracy worth all the risks and problems that necessarily go with it? Or would we be happier by admitting that the whole thing was a lark from the start and now that it hasn’t worked out, to hell with it" (GSH, p. 22). The question, which rests at the heart of Thompson’s work, might serve as a thematic summary of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and perhaps of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well. For all its arrogance and outrageousness, the best Gonzo writing, like the best American writing generally, is never far from this vexed and vexing issue that renews itself at each turn in our national experience.

"I want you to know," Raoul Duke screams to a hapless hitchhiker, "‘that we’re on our way to Las Vegas to find the American Dream’"(FLLV, p. 6). Duke’s fire-apple red convertible, as it screams

through the same desert that Sam Clemens crossed so painfully a century before, is a far cry from Huck Finn’s raft, but both serve to carry willing readers into a delineation of American pettiness, corruption, and hypocrisy. Duke and his "Samoan attorney," like Huck and Jim, encounter a perversion of the Dream, not the Dream itself. As in Huck’s book, we learn of the Dream reflexively, through the dark glass formed by the dispiriting scenes through which the travelers pass. Duke and his attorney have none of the leavening innocence of Huck and Tom, and in many ways they contribute to the perversion they witness, but the cumulative effect of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is to make us call out for some other, better vision, something closer to the ideal itself. Like Thompson (in a discussion of the Nixon presidency), we long for an "alternative to [this] cheap and meanhearted view of the American Dream. . .(GSH, p. 21).¹² It is in keeping with the tenor of Gonzo writing that at times Thompson seems downright petulant about the Dream’s corruption—as if he takes the betrayal personally. At the same time, however, he tells us somewhat cryptically, as the convertible hurtles on, that

our trip was something different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country. . . . (FLLV, p. 18)

Even the most pliable reader will have trouble viewing Duke’s trip as an affirmation of all things right and decent, but only the most inflexible will refuse to regard this passage as anything but a piece of ironic cynicism. Duke is only marginally more able than Huck to speak of the Dream, but in giving us the story of Duke’s immersion in a particular instance of our national madness, Thompson, like Mark Twain, traces the direction of our drift away from the ideal we allege to espouse. Finally, he says,

Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility. . . . Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of "the rat race" is not yet final. (GSH, p. 406).

The tyranny of the rat race—of mundanity, limitation, and conventionality—was as much the bane of the Washoe Journalist as it is of his Gonzo counterpart. In characteristic moments both interpose themselves, or their personae, between their audiences and the anecdotal accounts they "cover" with highly fictive layers of adventure, exaggeration, and humor. The best among them, their significant differences and idiosyncrasies notwithstanding, often put their work to the serious purpose of scoring and attempting at least implicitly to correct the

tendency of our national character to fall away from the myths which comprise the American Dream. While Hunter Thompson’s shadow by no means fills that cast by Mark Twain, the two shadows do intersect. In the darkness of that intersection, in the orneriness, heterodoxy, profanity and brooding seriousness of their work, we paradoxically discover a persistent point of light—and heat—in the record of American journalistic literature.

FRANKLIN AND MARSHALL COLLEGE

NOTES

    ¹Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 72 (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973), pp. 47–48. Future references to this text, abbreviated FLCT, will appear parenthetically in the body of the essay.
    ²Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (New York: Summit Books, 1979), p. 106. Future references to this text, abbreviated GSH, will appear parenthetically in the body of the essay. Later Thompson makes a tangential point in relation to a statement he attributes to Muhammad Au: "My way of joking is to tell the truth. That’s the funniest joke in the world. "Indeed," muses Thompson. "And that is also as fine a definition of ‘Gonzo Journalism’ as anything I’ve ever heard, for good or ill" (GSH, p. 565).
    ³Mark Twain’s Roughing It (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1972), p. 112. Future referenced to this text, abbreviated RI, will appear parenthetically in the body of the essay.
    ⁴For an account of Sam Clemens’ own experience with a controversy which nearly led him to a duel and which apparently did lead to his leaving Virginia City, Nevada, in 1964, see Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain of the Enterprise: Newspaper Articles & Other Documents 1862–1864 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, l957), p. 27.
    ⁵In describing Mark Twain’s experience as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, Paul J. Carter, Jr., observes that "The editor of the paper . . . realized that his readers wanted to be amused, and he encouraged his reporters to satisfy them. Men who faced death daily from cave-ins, explosions and bullets preferred humor to news, except when the news concerned their fortunes. They wanted to laugh, not think, and the more absurd, ridiculous, rough and fantastic the source, the better they liked it." "The influence of the Nevada Frontier on Mark Twain," Western Humanities Review, 13 (winter 1959), 64.
    ⁶The subjective writer’s willingness or unwillingness to become his own protagonist may, after all, establish the clearest point of distinction between Gonzo and New Journalism. Describing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as "a first, gimped effort in a direction that what Tom Wolfe calls ‘The New Journalism’ has been flirting with for almost a decade," Thompson says, "Wolfe’s problem is that he’s too crusty to participate in his stories" (GSH, p. 108). While the New Journalist’s chief means of acknowledging the subjectivity of his work is stylistic, the Gonzo writer, in addition to maintaining an idiosyncratic style, takes a major part among his own dramatis personae.
    ⁷In discussing "the distinction between ‘straight’ journalist Sam Clemens and the irresponsibly imaginative Mark Twain," Smith remarks that "Although Mark Twain was privileged to say anything—or almost anything—he pleased, Sam Clemens was expected to practice serious journalism, and most of the time he accepted this professional responsibility." Smith, p. 9.
    ⁸Mark Twain’s, The Innocents Abroad or the New Pilgrim’s Progress (New York: Harper, 1903), p. xxxvii.

    ⁹Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 41. Future references to this text, abbreviated FLLV, will appear parenthetically in the body of the essay.
    ¹⁰Significantly, Thompson draws this characterization of "the mean nature" of reality in a very early piece dealing with the problems that beset contemporary writers. Confronting "a world that will not stand still," he says, "is not just a writer’s crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when chaos is static, and a superhuman task in a time when chaos is multiplying" (GSH, p. 372).
    ¹¹Mark Twain describes the West as having taken on some of the trappings of civilization without having become civilized. Consider his account of Virginia City during its "flush times": "There were military companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, ‘hurdy-gurdy houses,’ wideopen gambling palaces, political powpows, civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whiskey mill every fifteen steps, a Board of Aldermen, a Mayor, a City Surveyor, a City Engineer, a Chief of the Fire Department, with First, Second and Third Assistants, a Chief of Police, City Marshall, and a large police force, two Boards of Mining Brokers, a dozen breweries and half a dozen jails and station-houses in full operation, and some talk of building a church" (RI, p. 274).
    ¹²" . . . it is Nixon himself," Thompson says elsewhere, "who represents that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise. . . . He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding sting-warts, on nights when the moon comes too close. . . (FLCT, pp. 416–417).